Collapse of Systems, not our Humanity

Author and journalist Sarah Wilson, philosopher AC Grayling and existential risk researcher Luke Kemp bring three vantage points to the same unravelling. Civilisations have always fallen like great Goliaths, but this one is global, and the weapons in its hands are totalising: nuclear, algorithmic, atmospheric.

Compounding these weapons is the logic that wields them. A handful of actors locked in a race no one wins, and the assumption that whatever can be built should be.

The question is not whether we are in collapse, but what survives it. We are far better cooperating than competing in the face of this leviathan, change that draws its force from the ground up as much as from coordination across borders. This is the fork. Small right moves are contagious, and no one is coming to save us. We are the adults in the room.

To be human is to be attuned to the living world, both magnificent and destructive. Untether from the mythology of more, and the system collapsing us may be the one we outlast.